Back-side blurb

[Memnoch]

Originally Posted by Spectrum

Not underachieving. Just "minor" because there's no greatness to be found in Redglen. (I probably should scrap the "minor" from the blurb, tho.) And yes, he is destined for greatness, but not in the way you expect.

I don't understand what this means. Please elaborate.

Just a quick addition, when I said underachieving if he's destined for greatness is he not underachieving at the point where he is minor scholar. . . this is a good example of the blurb influencing my opinions of your character already.

Also a little more elaboration as you asked for ,the blurb has lead me to have these opinions. Yet your defence to alot of the comments seems to be, "He's destined for greatness but not as you expect!" Or "it's like this, but different" etc . . What do you think I expect, if you think you know what I may expect yet say it will be different, I won't realise my expectations are incorrect until, I read your novel, yet I may not want to read your novel, on the basis the blurbs inspired expectations, don't really interest me as it seems similar to other stories? (d'ya giet meh son?) also (I'd quote you properly but am not to clued up with the tools here to do it lol)

[Spectrum]

Originally Posted by Memnoch

Good for you, I just felt the names seemed a touch overthought. I hate every time I read a name in a book, thinking how should this be pronounced.

Well, I will of course have an extensive pronunciation guide. But the names will be exotic-looking and (at times) deliberately difficult to pronounce. That's just my style of writing.

Originally Posted by Memnoch

I understood underground meant a covert struggle and your elaboration in subsequent posts confirmed my first thoughts of two lots of erm . . bad guys vying for supremecy in relativley unknown struggles to the rest of the worlds populace, yadda yadda yadda . . . if you haven't read this you haven't read much of Feist, Martin, Erikson and Tolkien(to a degree) and of course evedident in the bore series, Wheel of Time, I mention Baldurs Gate the RPG PC game because it's a big part of the sequel the Theives guild having an "underground" or perhaps "underworld" is a better term, war with the Assasins guild.

Yeah, OK, I see your point. I don't know how to explain it to make the differences evident, but I'll think on it.

Originally Posted by Memnoch

You need to want us (the consumer) to really want to know what happens in your tale. Add a bit of mystery don't lay it all out for us to assume that it is like evey other similar book.

Hm... it's hard to add much mystery in ten lines...

Originally Posted by Memnoch

You asked for critique, you don't need to be so defensive, I'm a consumer and obviously my opinions are purely that, opinions.

I am not defensive, and I will kill anyone who calls me that! :P :mrgreen:

Originally Posted by Memnoch

Also a little more elaboration as you asked for ,the blurb has lead me to have these opinions. Yet your defence to alot of the comments seems to be, "He's destined for greatness but not as you expect!" Or "it's like this, but different" etc . . What do you think I expect, if you think you know what I may expect yet say it will be different, I won't realise my expectations are incorrect until, I read your novel,

(The following will be rather incoherent, because I have a bunch of incoherent thoughts on this subject which I am feebly trying to express.)

Well, I have some plot twists in my story that are intended as surprises, especially regarding Carzain here. The concept is that he starts out as a hero and later turns around and becomes a villain.

Overall, the genre I'm writing is very dark fantasy with a lot of focus on the villain characters. But I probably should make this clear at an early point, to attract people who like this kind of thing. So, I say that "it's not like you expect" because I expect you to expect a standard story of a hero who vanquishes evil. Which it's not, it's more like the story of a villain who vanquishes 'good'.

But I don't quite know how to use the 'surprise' factor. I don't know if I should set the reader up to believe one thing and then surprise him in mid-book or if I should clearly signal at the beginning that the story is going to deviate from the archetype (at which point it's no longer a surprise). I will probably want to do the latter, but I don't quite know how to do that.

Does any of this make sense?

[Memnoch]

Yes makes very good sense and I've always loved the idea of a main character or plot line, that is about bad/evil, stays bad/evil and doesn't end up being good/defeated and you end up loving them/the plot anyway lol (Hanibal Lector - great example)

See now I am more interested.

[Spectrum]

Originally Posted by Memnoch

Yes makes very good sense and I've always loved the idea of a main character or plot line, that is about bad/evil, stays bad/evil and doesn't end up being good/defeated and you end up loving them/the plot anyway lol (Hanibal Lector - great example)

See now I am more interested.

Thanks. Another indication that I should signal these things from the beginning. I'll see if I can work that into the blurb somehow.

(It's hard for me to write the blurb right now, tho, since I don't have the story planned out in more than the vaguest terms. I'll hopefully be able to write a better one when I have a better idea of what's going to happen.)

[Interference]

"In the south, the theocratic empire of Durcac, seeking an advantage against their rival nation" is probably a tautology. You don't go into battle without seeking some advantage.

"the Imetrium, send their armies north, bent on conquest" ditto.

"In the peaceful town of Redglen, the young mage Carzain is bored with life as a minor scholar, so when the king of Runger invades, Carzain volunteers for the army." Feels like too many words when all you want the browsing buyer to know is that a bored scholar seeks adventure in the army and that, as per the following para, dark secrets from his past await him.

"a sinister force thought long extinct seems to be awakening" is just a bit too wishy-washy. Either a sinister force is wakening and is something to worry about, or it isn't and we can get back to our soduko.

I like the story it's telling us about but I think it's a long way from ad-speke of short, punchy sentences no more than a Chav's eye-full long.

[Interference]

Originally Posted by Spectrum

But the names will be exotic-looking and (at times) deliberately difficult to pronounce. That's just my style of writing.

I love it when an author puts in loads of stuff you can just skip over. Makes the whole book a lot --- shorter, in a way

[Spectrum]

Originally Posted by Interference

I love it when an author puts in loads of stuff you can just skip over. Makes the whole book a lot --- shorter, in a way

What do you mean by this?

[Interference]

Just that exotic-looking names that are difficult to pronounce wouldn't detain the average reader for too long. Some people will take the time to provide a satisfactory pronunciation which may or may not approximate to the author's intended sound, thereby taking longer over reading the book, while others will make up their own pronunciations, or devise an alternative short-hand way of remembering the character, or skip over these words altogether in the interests of getting to the end of the book more quickly.

It was an off-the-cuff and flippant remark that I hadn't expected to have to analyse or explain, but now I have I can see it has some shortcomings as a commentary.

The major shortcoming as I see it is in its failure to address the issue of placing obstructions before an audience which might prevent a reader from continuing, which was the issue that actually prompted the remark. This isn't a judgement, of course, and shouldn't be seen as one, which is why I didn't make it one at the time. Far from it.

I have so far, in two books, used two "unpronouncable" names, one for a major player - and I hope the avid reader will take pains eventually to find out how I intend the name to be pronounced - the other a (currently) minor character whose name can be pronounced like a sneeze in the reader's inner ear as far as I'm concerned. Before using either name, I wondered if the effect would be off-putting in a first novel. But, after all, is there a consensus even now on how to pronounce Lestrade from Conan Doyle? Or Mina from Stoker? Or Uniatz from Charteris?

A friend complained to me that one of my invented names (purportedly of human origin) "wasn't a real name", though he didn't have anything at all to say about the other (probably alien). In the former instance I asked how he knew it wasn't real as, in my view, any sound a voice can make has probably been used to name something at some time in human history. But to him, its unlikelihood as a true 'name' placed the integrity of some of the other story details under scruitiny, which was an undesirable effect even for a fairy-tale like story about a future civilisation's first experience of snow.

In skipping the name (which as mentioned before might have been pronounced as a sneeze) he actually missed what I considered an important linking adjunct to my story, which was to do with seasonal ailments (colds and 'flus) and excessively aggressive defensive measures.

Other writers might tend to write chapters of info-dump that have no bearing on plot, character of human enrichment; also potentially discouraging, also prone to being skipped over by the reader.

And there are authors who recap stuff you've already read in a previous volume. These pages, too, can be ignored and can leave the book with markedly fewer pages left in it to read.

And other scribes who just write too many valueless words that aren't germain to a complete understanding of the issue under exposition: these, too, can be skipped without fear of missing too much.

But rather than go into this wealth of fascinating but ultimately pointless, and probably utterly unnecessary, detail, I decided to try and encapsulate my entire thinking processes in one madly witty and fantastically humourous comment: "I love it when an author puts in loads of stuff you can just skip over. Makes the whole book a lot --- shorter, in a way" that was both enigmatic and completely misunderstood - or possibly not understood at all.



And yet again I wonder if my writing is completely obscure all the time or only when I try to be witty? I think I'll give it up and sell second-hand cars for the rest of my life....


Pompous? Me? What an unwarranted and if I may say so marginally insulting assertion, though I unreservedly support your right to make it.

[Spectrum]

LOL, well, if you expected all that to be deducible from the one-liner, then I'm afraid you'll need to work more on your "data compression" skills. :P

Anyway, the unpronounceability of my names is not a problem, because I have a detailed pronunciation guide in the book. (I'll have to remember to put in a "heads up" at the beginning of the book, reminding the reader that the pronunciation guide is there.)

If the reader is unwilling to look up pronunciation, then the reader is an idiot.

[Interference]

And nobody wants idiots reading their books. Lowers the tone.

[The Bloated Shaganat]

If they are paying 'idiots' I could live with it....

[Lith]

If the reader is unwilling to look up pronunciation, then the reader is an idiot.

Color me an idiot then. I only look at that sort of stuff if I'm already into the story, and am getting confused by details and similarities of names (why do so many authors insist on naming two major characters with similar names?). If I see a lot of difficult looking names in the blurb on the back of the book, it doesn't make me want to pick up the book... and I usually end up laughing at the names, which I'm sure isn't the intended effect of most authors.

Perhaps it's because English lacks pronounciation marks on letters, but I don't like seeing them much. They're inherently confusing, and it says to me either the author has a long, detailed system, which he wants you to learn (which really means he is picky about you mis-pronouncing his/her names, though undoubtedly you will still mispronounce them), or they're just making it all up because it sounds cool. Neither endears me to the story.

That or I'm just too damned critical a reader. I might read more fantasy if it weren't all so same-same, and its authors actually knew something about the history, politics, social behavior, and languages they write about (this isn't aimed so much at you as it is just a general rant...).

[Oykib]

Originally Posted by Lith

Color me an idiot then. I only look at that sort of stuff if I'm already into the story, and am getting confused by details and similarities of names (why do so many authors insist on naming two major characters with similar names?). If I see a lot of difficult looking names in the blurb on the back of the book, it doesn't make me want to pick up the book... and I usually end up laughing at the names, which I'm sure isn't the intended effect of most authors.

Perhaps it's because English lacks pronounciation marks on letters, but I don't like seeing them much. They're inherently confusing, and it says to me either the author has a long, detailed system, which he wants you to learn (which really means he is picky about you mis-pronouncing his/her names, though undoubtedly you will still mispronounce them), or they're just making it all up because it sounds cool. Neither endears me to the story.

That or I'm just too damned critical a reader. I might read more fantasy if it weren't all so same-same, and its authors actually knew something about the history, politics, social behavior, and languages they write about (this isn't aimed so much at you as it is just a general rant...).

I could not agree with you more. I was saving a reply to this, but you hit the nail on the head.

[j. d. worthington]

Jarshen... for some odd reason, the spam filter held back your posts (darned if I know why)... anyway, they should be showing just fine now, and sorry for the holdup....

[Sephiroth]

Well I, for one, am reassured by your rant, Lith. I often wonder if I'm wasting my time going into such details in my world-building. The more I see people who think like me, the more I believe it's not a waste of time.

Most of what I've done will never be mentioned in the story, or perhaps mentioned only once, in passing. But it's there, and it affects the way I think about the world when I'm writing. I want people to believe that the world I'm writing about is every bit as real (and complex) as the one we inhabit.